Twitter Technical Glitch Takes A Political Turn In India

A technical glitch in the micro-blogging platform Twitter, caused a global uproar after its users experienced a fluctuation in the number of likes and retweets since yesterday (February 12). The social media company confirmed the issue and said that it was working to fix the issue.

Due to the technical glitch, users across the world saw diminishing likes and retweets on their posts. This situation, however, took to a political turn in India after some netizens alleged that this was the company’s move to discriminate against right wing parties.

The situation followed an uproar in India by certain groups which were inflamed by the fact that Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey failed to attend the Indian parliamentary hearing held on February 11.

As the technical glitch caused a miscalculation of the numbers, many Indian users took to the platform and said that the company was intentionally increasing the number of likes and retweets on posts made by the opposition party including Congress president Rahul Gandhi.

Allegations of a political conspiracy were voiced by BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma who revealed the bulging numbers of retweets and likes being received by the opposite party members.

This is not the first time, the company has been accused of being politically biased. Earlier this month, members of a right-wing group called ‘Youth for Social Media Democracy’ had protested outside Twitter’s India office alleging that Twitter has an anti-right wing attitude.

Accusing the company of blocking their accounts and tweets, the protestors demanded a change in the policy.

Following the protests, Twitter had responded saying that they “do not take any actions based upon political viewpoints.”

The Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology is looking at options to send a ‘strong’ message to the social media company after its top executives declined to attend the parliamentary session.

These issues are being subject to heightened scrutiny as the country is looking to conduct the  Lok Sabha elections 2019 in May. In order to curb the spread of false information and news which may influence the voting decision, the central government has been taking several initiatives to regulate content on social media platforms.